HARVEST. The hidden neuroscience of control. Vol. 1

The technocratic civilization of the last four centuries dismissed this body of knowledge as superstition, not because of the falsity of its observations. In fact, no one refuted them. Rather, it was because they, by definition, did not fit within the rigid research frameworks that modernity had established for itself, excluding from the field of accepted knowledge everything that did not fit within them. The reason is that taking such knowledge seriously would require a wholesale restructuring of the power system. A system in which human attention is recognized as inalienable property and a source of personal power is structurally incompatible with a model in which this attention serves as free raw material, extracted without the knowledge of its owner. Of these two concepts, the latter, naturally, has an interest in keeping the former permanently dismissed as marginalia, occultism, and amateur mysticism, deprived of institutional support. Only in recent decades — through quantum mechanics on one hand and neuroscience on the other — has this ancient knowledge gradually returned to academic audiences. And it does so with the characteristic embarrassment with which a long-banned library finally appears on the shelves, pretending that there was never any ban.

An ancient Slavic proverb says, "Where attention draws, energy flows; where energy flows, blood follows". This is the most accurate description of the physical process permeating all levels of a living organism. The word "flows" conveys the dynamic, fluid nature of the final stage. The only flow that materializes the hidden dynamics in the physical body is the movement of blood. This picture appears perfectly logical through the prism of the areas of physics that developed primarily in the Soviet scientific school in the 20th century (we will return to them in more detail). The medium filling the space between visible atoms obeys laws similar to gas mechanics. When a vortex of such a medium condenses to the state of matter, it successively passes through the phases of gas, liquid, and solid. Blood belongs to that level of condensation that still retains fluidity and the ability to quickly redistribute. But at the same time, it already possesses substance, the ability to transport molecules, hormones, and oxygen. Blood is located exactly midway between the world of waves and the world of forms. It is precisely this borderline nature that makes it the first physical conductor of those changes that are initiated by our attention.

In the Slavic energy system, human development is described through three kingdoms. Silver is associated with the physical body and the lower centers. Copper pertains to the spiritual realm, its core being the middle centers, where the heart plays the role of the core. Gold corresponds to the spirit and is associated with the upper centers. Blood occupies a special position in this system. It is the only tissue in the body that continuously circulates through all three kingdoms simultaneously. It bathes the lower centers, flows through the middle centers, and ascends to the upper centers. Its main driving force remains the center of the Copper Kingdom, the very "table" of the Manifest World where the vertical of the subtle and dense converges. No other tissue possesses the property of pervasive presence. Therefore, blood is essentially the physical integrator of the entire system, the body’s mobile memory, storing the imprint of each center it has passed through. Within this algorithm, each iron-containing vortex structure (as the hemoglobin molecule is constructed) represents a microscopic antenna. In addition to transporting oxygen, it is capable of perceiving subtle signals from the environment in which directed attention unfolds. When the gaze focuses on a specific area of the body, organ, or image, a local restructuring of the vortex fields is triggered at that point. This change is detected by the "iron" vortices of the blood and, in a matter of seconds, is distributed throughout the entire vascular system. Reaching each cell, this impulse determines which biochemical processes will be initiated next. Blood is manifested thought — information condensed into fluid matter. This statement best explains why directed attention has such specific and measurable physiological effects, which have been discussed in various traditions for millennia. In particular, this explains why yogic concentration on certain channels — nadis — can instantly alter local blood flow. By managing attention, a person controls the movement of the environment. When it shifts, they directly influence the blood. Subsequently, the processes in the life of each cell are restructured. The entire chain unfolds in seconds, without conscious analysis or the mediation of a thinking self. For this reason, attention should be viewed as a direct physical effect on blood flow. Anyone who can intercept its direction from the outside isn’t controlling a person’s "opinion" or "mood" — it’s a direct intervention at the level of cellular biochemistry. In any other situation, such manipulation would be classified as invasive medicine, requiring patient consent, a license, and strict oversight. But in this case, no one asks for your consent.

Attention is structured on multiple levels and exhibits different properties depending on the register in which it operates. It can be aptly likened to a telescope, which, when changing its focal length, produces polar images of the same object. Without a diagram of these levels, it’s impossible to understand the structure I’ve agreed to call "the farm". Its entire engineering is built on managing which level of consciousness a person is currently stuck on. I propose we "tour" these levels. First, we’ll descend, since the farm’s influence is directed from top to bottom, "pressing consciousness to the ground". And then we’ll ascend, because liberation occurs in the opposite direction — from the lower to the upper levels, gradually returning consciousness to the higher ones, from which the entire panorama opens.

The first, lowest level, includes immediate physical sensations. All sensory stimuli arrive here, and here the body’s immediate response occurs, preempting any mental interpretation. A heard word can cause muscles to tense or relax. A seen image can cause the heart to accelerate or decelerate. A sudden change in the environment causes a subtle shift in the depth and rhythm of breathing, peristalsis, body temperature, and pupillary function. The brain, confronted with any semantic trigger, activates physiological processes that would occur during a real-life encounter with the object within tens or hundreds of milliseconds — that is, on a scale before the mind has even begun to engage. These programs unfold before a person can even comprehend what has happened. It is on this level that the crudest and most effective tools of influence operate: from an advertising banner to a sharp sound behind you or a sudden change in lighting in a shopping mall. A split second before the conscious mind can even recognize what exactly has appeared on the screen, the observer’s diaphragm instantly contracts, the adrenal glands release the first dose of adrenaline into the bloodstream, and the amygdala issues the "danger" command. At this point, the conscious mind, having arrived late to the biological event that has already occurred, only has to find a verbal description. This must be done quickly and convincingly enough to create the illusion that this explanation was the cause. Then, in fact, the reaction arose before any agenda and is completely independent of it.

The basement is home not so much to humans as conscious subjects, but to evolutionarily ancient structures that predate self-awareness: mirror neurons, the amygdala, and the brainstem. This system, hundreds of millions of years old, formed long before the advent of speech. Here, a basic response is automatically triggered, a response that connects humans to any mammal. Attention instantly shifts to a sharp, unexpected signal. In the environment in which our ancestors lived, such an impulse meant one of three things: prey, a threat, or the appearance of a fellow human being, and therefore justified any ongoing activity. Everything that reacts faster than thought is concentrated on this level. And a person accustomed to perceiving themselves as autonomous subjects usually finds themselves here after the fact, when an action initiated without their conscious participation has occurred.

One level above that is the background state — the general affective climate in which a person lives day after day. Unlike the first-floor outburst, it isn’t perceived as a signal, as it lacks a distinct figure from which to distance oneself. It’s the environment, and its invisibility is precisely its main strength. Awakeness, fatigue, anxiety, calm, depression, elation, alertness, relaxation, openness, withdrawal — each of these states sets a filter through which a person evaluates everything else. And it does so consistently and imperceptibly that this prism seems a natural property of the world, like the air they breathe, as something identical to themselves. The effect of this internal state is easier to demonstrate in simple life situations. If you’re depressed, your partner’s unintentional tardiness is perceived as "he’s fallen out of love," "I’m not important," a harbinger of loss and the beginning of the end. A similar delay, against a backdrop of peace of mind, will evoke entirely different thoughts: perhaps the person was simply stuck in traffic. A stranger’s gaze on the subway, met with caution, is interpreted as a threat or a challenge. But when you’re open to the world, it will seem like ordinary human curiosity. A single stimulus, depending on the receiver’s settings, shapes different realities for us. And whoever controls it influences all subsequent perception — before consciousness has a chance to engage and make a decision. The second floor is the most difficult to identify precisely because it doesn’t manifest as a separate entity. While the first floor manifests a sharp impulse and can be consciously distanced, the second floor creates a stable state in which a person lives for weeks, months, years — sometimes decades — without perceiving it as something separate from themselves. Only occasionally, for example, in a village, in the mountains, by the sea, or after a long walk in the forest — a person is astonished to discover that all this time there has been a continuous noise inside them, reminiscent of the hum of a poorly tuned transformer. And when it briefly subsides, the traveler begins to hear himself for the first time in years. This is that rare moment when the background noise suddenly becomes visible. But it’s short-lived; returning to a familiar environment immediately restores the previous state. It’s precisely this stealth that makes the second floor the farm’s main strategic resource. Attacks on the first floor are episodic and can be recognized in retrospect. The farm’s presence on the second floor, by contrast, is almost imperceptible. News feeds, the frantic rhythm of social media, the lighting of shopping malls, the vibrations of a smartphone in your pocket, the color schemes of the interiors, and the interface design — the entire infrastructure is meticulously tuned to maintain a trance-like state in which all other instruments operate many times more effectively. Disrupt the background noise, and the entire megastructure will fail. But as long as the broadcast continues uninterrupted, the farm can remain unfazed by isolated attacks from residents for as long as it likes. If a 15th-century ruler had been given access to the background states of his subjects, he would have been considered a sorcerer and likely burned at the stake as an enemy of humanity. At the beginning of the 21st century, such access is sold as an advertising contract — and the buyer wears a tie.

One level higher are specific emotions — affective modalities with a distinct expression, recognizable phenomenology, and neurochemical signature. Fear is associated with the release of cortisol and norepinephrine, joy with dopamine and endorphins, anger with testosterone and adrenaline, interest with dopamine and acetylcholine, disgust with activation of the insular cortex, and surprise with the simultaneous release of several neurotransmitter systems. Each emotion, in addition to its neurochemistry, has its own intensity — a control lever. It’s easily accessible, knowing the precise coordinates and the required force. A modern recommendation algorithm operates these levers with a precision that surpasses the user’s introspective abilities. The system analyzes millions of local actions: every swipe, scroll, pause on a specific image, rejection, like, or comment, and builds a behavioral profile based on this massive dataset. It catalogs a person’s emotional responses by their degree of reactivity: content evokes fear (say, 70 % out of 100 %), interest (60 %), or indignation (95 %). Based on this data, an optimal cocktail is created to keep the user on the platform for as long as possible. This flow is neither so monotonous as to cause fatigue nor so varied as to disrupt the emotional flow. A precisely calibrated mixture is created, calculated by a neural network, to optimize a single parameter: retention time.

In his book, "The Puppeteer’s Bible," Tom Walker coined the term "the influence stack". It’s a system of seven parallel columns with a single, unifying effect. An individual is completely powerless against it, even if they’re a genius. This is due to the overload of the nervous system, which the stack influences through all channels simultaneously. The desire decoder calculates which of the eight basic needs drive a specific user’s behavior. These include survival, security, status, belonging, love, autopilot, self-actualization, and validation. The algorithm analyzes the hierarchy of all deficits in the personality structure and selects content that directly appeals to its dominant component. The next element is the "connection forger". It creates an emotional attachment to the source of information, turning leaving the platform into a subjective experience of loss, and operates on the same neurochemistry as attachment to a living being. The release of oxytocin with each notification from a "loved one" is indistinguishable in molecular composition from the hormonal surge of a real hug. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish who exactly is being "hugged". Finally, the "narrative neuralizer" immerses the user in an epic story. There, they are assigned a special role, meaning, and destiny, becoming something far bigger than a content consumer. A fighter for justice awakens within them, a guardian of tradition, a herald of a new ethic, a defender of the oppressed, a hero of the mystical battle between good and evil. And this grandiose spectacle unfolds right now, in your personal feed, before your eyes. Once occupied, the role becomes ingrained in the wearer with the same organic density with which, in Dostoevsky’s "Demons," the mask of an ideological hero adheres to an underdeveloped personality, condemning them to the reproduction of a theatrical movement for the rest of their days. Leaving his role would inevitably return him to everyday life, where he is an absolute zero. Such an invisible status is subjectively far more unbearable than any risks that come with the chosen status.

The next column, the "linguistic master key," operates with keywords as triggers for pre-existing neural networks and implies a separate layer for analysis, which we’ll explore later. The "cognitive exploit" draws on over two hundred mental traps, organized by Kahneman and his followers: anchoring, social proof, framing, illusion of control, and confirmation bias. Each bias is a door left by evolution, open to anyone with the access code. The "ethical roadmap," paradoxically strengthening the puppeteer’s power, disguises the algorithm as a moral stance. The platform’s demonstrative restraint in certain matters is far more effective than outright exploitation, as its declared ethics completely allays any suspicions in the user. "Neural rewiring" lies at the foundation of the entire stack. Until a person masters their own "mental patterns," they are unable to distinguish between those of others, and any combination of the six previous columns passes through them, bypassing resistance. When a user sincerely believes they are participating in a meaningful discussion, they are, in fact, navigating a pre-set stage, where every remark they make was predicted months before they utter it, as the script is built on a mathematical model trained on the digital traces of billions of users like themselves — the puppets.

Above this is the cognitive level, where the integration of the first three occurs. Sensory sensations, states, and specific emotions come together here. On this basis, the brain constructs interpretations, searches for patterns, builds logical chains, compares incoming information with previous experience, and formulates and tests hypotheses. This floor is dominated by the prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily the youngest and most resource-intensive part of our brain. Its proper functioning requires significant amounts of glucose, oxygen, time, and relative rest. It’s no coincidence that "The Farm" systematically suppresses it with chronic cortisol: a person who has ascended to the fourth floor sees how the algorithm works — the last thing the digital industry is willing to tolerate. Cattle who see a fence cease to be cattle. Chronic cortisol pressure suppresses the prefrontal cortex and redirects resources to the limbic system, responsible for the "fight, flight, or freeze" response. This design is justified by evolution: when faced with a real threat, there’s no time to think; action is necessary. Under conditions of constant stress caused by the endless consumption of clickbait and disturbing content, the body switches to a reflexive response. People simply lose the ability to rise above the third floor. They no longer have the ability to do so, nor even the notion that there are other floors above them.

Most discussions presented in the media as political, ideological, or substantive take place not on the fourth floor, but on the third floor, skillfully disguised as the fourth. These are pure emotional reactions dressed up in the guise of arguments, clashes of intra-group identities framed as clashes of positions, collective battles disguised as philosophical dialogues — all the things Dostoevsky wrote about in "Demons". And he said more than enough on this subject. Late-night talk show hosts don’t argue with each other; they work together, like two hands playing the same instrument, to pull the lever of the third floor for millions of viewers. The visible conflict onstage is a structural cooperation behind the scenes. Each side desperately needs an adversary, because without an enemy there is no performance, without spectacle there is no excitement, and therefore without affect there are no ratings. The fourth floor is practically silent. It requires days to ponder a single question, which doesn’t fit within the confines of a social media post; it doesn’t garner likes or generate viral reactions. Its economy is incompatible with the attention economy, and that’s precisely why it’s absent from the public sphere. When a general audience encounters a third-floor thinker, their thoughtful, cautious speech seems dull and unconvincing. The listener’s nervous system is tuned to a completely different dynamic, and the slow rhythm of genuine, profound thought is perceived as a failure and an absence of something that should be there. Chekhov offers a wonderful example: a provincial teacher, pondering the same thought for years, seems ridiculous to a metropolitan columnist, but twenty years later it turns out that the poor fellow has been mulling over other people’s thoughts one at a time, and none of them were his own.

Above the fourth floor is the system floor. Anyone who has managed to ascend here sees much more than disparate elements: their consciousness is revealed to the deep connections between them. They no longer see the world as a conglomerate of random events; they discover programs, cause-and-effect relationships, and structural isomorphisms. The explanation for their state no longer fits into primitive linear schemas. It unfolds into a complex sequence: "I’m anxious because I watched the news this morning — cortisol suppressed my prefrontal cortex, and I automatically attributed internal tension to external circumstances, whereas the source of the panic lies within the neurochemical cycle triggered by the content". On the fifth floor, the figure of the personal enemy disappears completely. A person stops seeing a specific politician, boss, or relative as the root cause of their troubles. He perceives the structure as a whole and realizes that the content matrix churns out precisely these phantoms in millions of others, and the "enemies" themselves are simply masks replacing one another on an endless stage. Before him stands a similar set, its architect faceless and always behind the scenes. Recognizing this architecture, a person stops attacking masks. This is one of the most powerful liberations available to him in the current environment, which is why access to it is carefully blocked. Climbing to the systemic level is impossible while in a frenzy. It requires time, silence, the ability to simultaneously hold contradictory facts in mind and slowly reduce them to a simple essence. For this reason, it is consistently driven out of our lives.

The highest level is the planetary one. Here, the center of perception shifts from the egocentric "I" to the entire system as a whole, and the key question is not "how does this affect me" but "how does this affect everything". When thinking in the first person, throwing a cigarette butt out a car window seems like a minor infraction: "Just one cigarette in a big city, nothing bad will happen". But when perception shifts to the planetary level, it becomes clear: an action either helps or harms, and there is no middle ground. As a result, one cigarette butt, multiplied by billions of others, changes water systems, soils, and biocenoses. From such a height, there are no "trifles"; here, expanding consciousness means changing the focal length of the telescope of attention. When you learn to freely shift your focus across the entire spectrum — from the level of the body to the scale of the planet — you stop dividing the world into black and white. You gain a deeper understanding, a more comprehensive assessment, and a systemic perspective, making you immune to primitive manipulations that only work on the lower floors. Climbing to the sixth floor, you see the "farm" from a bird’s eye view: its location, hidden fences, and conveyor belts. From this vantage point, there’s no need to fear shadows on the pen wall. Therefore, the entire system is optimized to prevent a person from climbing above the second floor. There’s no need to prohibit anything or outlaw climbing. It’s enough to make it physiologically expensive — requiring metabolic resources the user simply doesn’t have, since the farm has already extracted them. It’s enough to make the silence unbearable, so that a person runs from it like fire, and to fill every hour with surrogate stimuli, leaving the prefrontal cortex no chance for analytical work. That’s how the farm works.

In our discussion of the levels of attention, we examined the vertical axis — the levels at which consciousness can exist at any given moment and move between them. However, beyond the vertical, there’s also a horizontal plane within a person, figuratively speaking, a moral landscape. Decades of accumulated experience is distributed unevenly within it, creating bright zones and dark spots that consciousness doesn’t explore for decades. Laziness has absolutely nothing to do with it; the whole point lies in the body’s energy conservation. To understand why the "farm" wields such devastating power over people formally aware of its existence, we need to describe the horizontal plane. It remains outside the scope of public discussions about the psyche, yet it determines a good half of the behavior of everyone living on Midgard-Earth.

Imagine an old house inhabited by a person with everything they’ve accumulated over the years. On the ground floor are the things they use every day: the kitchen, bedroom, workspace, and everyday objects that are on display. One floor above are rooms they visit less often but still keep tidy: a wardrobe with winter clothes, a library, a living room whose doors are opened only on special occasions. Even higher up is the attic, filled with childhood things, letters, and memorable trinkets they can’t bring themselves to part with. And finally, the basement. Over the years, things have accumulated there that they couldn’t bear to throw out: a deceased parent’s shoes, a box of children’s drawings, and odors that linger even after renovations. The basement is always filled with something. In the dim, cool conditions, something happens that never occurs in bright, upstairs rooms: objects stored below send subtle, intangible impulses upward, impulses that people usually don’t even notice. But as a result, they manifest as unreasonable sadness, nightmares, and irrational reactions to certain people and their tone of voice. The owner of the house doesn’t connect these phenomena to the basement. He attributes everything to "fatigue," "age," "autumn melancholy," or any other plausible reason beyond his personal history. An attempt to find the true source would require descending into the darkness. But this is undesirable for reasons as unconscious as the signals themselves. The basement is an image of an inner world, where all the unprocessed episodes of life that left a strong impression are preserved. For some reason, the person didn’t have the time or was unable to live them to the end. He didn’t bring this process to its natural conclusion through action, tears, words, or reflection. Instead, obeying the demands of circumstances, social norms, fear, haste, and the density of everyday life, he chose to close the lid and leave everything as it was. But the repressed episode didn’t disappear; it moved to the basement and continued to live its life there.